


Long Nights

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Bad Coping Methods, Flashbacks, Gen, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Rape Recovery, Self-Hatred, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 03:37:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10778757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: After being imprisoned and tortured by Templars, Hawke suffers from severe PTSD, flashbacks, and self-hatred. She relies on unhealthy coping methods, until she finally reaches out to Orana and lets another person care for her.





	Long Nights

Hawke awoke to the sound of her own sharp hiss. She bolted up in bed, heart pounding so fast her chest hurt, sweat making her hands slick as she grabbed for her staff to create light orbs despite the fact that ten candles burned already.  
More light flooded the room, and Hawke allowed herself to breathe with relief.

It had been three weeks since the Templars last touched her. Three weeks of living this hell.

She rose up from her bed, trying to push away her month-long imprisonment at the hands of Meredith's most sadistic interrogators. Her companions had killed them all when they crashed the place to let her out of there. Her companions had saved her. So why did she always have to feel this afraid?

Hawke gripped her staff tightly as she crept down the hallway and into her kitchen. Her assistants were still asleep, and Hawke preferred not to see them. Because what would she say? Bodahn and Sandal had no clue what to make of the situation, and Orana suddenly averted her eyes every time Hawke walked by as if the elf was afraid of her.

Of course, Hawke knew, Orana quite likely _was_ afraid of her. Hawke knew she had turned into a monster. The cruel and confusing silences where she stayed in her room for full days at a time; the explosive rages when she screamed at imaginary tormentors and kicked dents into the furniture. She had terrified the three of them, and turned into a pathetic lunatic who deserved to wallow alone.

Hawke reached her kitchen and yanked open the fridge. Orana had started cooking less, likely because of the battle it took each day to coax Hawke to eat. But truth be told, Hawke didn't want food--she wanted alcohol, and lots of it, enough to wash out the thoughts of **_hands holding her down and--_**

"No." The sharp outburst was directed, not at the ones who had hurt her, but at her own mind for forcing yet another replay of it.

**_Hands holding her down and draining her magic and cutting off her oxygen and strapping her to the whipping rack and--_ **

"Fuck!" Hawke sat down on the floor, wrapping her legs up around her and tucking her hands into the sleeves of her long house-robe. These nights, these moments alone, always made her feel cold as the dead of winter. "Maker, fuck, please, stop it, make it stop, I know I'm evil, I know I--"

She cut herself off mid-sentence, partially out of fear of waking the servants, yet mostly out of fear of where that sentence would lead. She realized she was holding a half-full bottle of the rum Isabela had dropped off for her. Ever since her ordeal, she had done these kinds of things--drinking too much on the kitchen floor, forgetting her own movements and actions, spacing out of the present moment, sobbing nonsense pleas into her own arms.

Hawke chugged the rum and rested her head against the counter. Maybe if she had more of her old self left, she would be able to summon one of her companions to come to her aid. But not now. They didn't want her anymore, and she knew it. She knew it in the way Isabela dropped off bottles of liquor and stayed to play card games, but always seemed to be in a hurry to go. She knew it in the way Merrill failed to giggle and make her usual awkward jokes. She knew it in Fenris's refusal to come see her at all, and Anders--  
Well.  
Anders didn't want her.

Those four words made her chest feel sore, as if she'd been wounded there by the Qunari blade that had once slashed through her gut. That day was long ago, back when she was a hero. Back before she had failed to stop her enemies from turning her into a piece of meat. A scrap of the worst meat, gray and rotten, the kind that decayed at the bottom of the barrel when even the flies didn't want it.

She downed the rest of the bottle and curled into a ball. She could sleep here. The bright light above her glared into her eyes, but it was soothing. At least it wasn't the dark. The floor was hard and cold and painful, but worlds better than her old cell had been.  
She would sleep easier here. She would feel less guilty here.

But the next round of nightmares made her retch up everything she'd drank, plus a bit of blood for good measure. That had been happening lately. She keened softly, submitting to the reality that she was slumped on her kitchen floor alone next to by an empty liquor bottle and covered in her own vomit. She staggered up, slowly, in agony. The alternative was letting Orana find her like this. She knew she would deserve the humiliation, but Orana didn't deserve to clean up her hideous mess.

After an hour-long cleanup of the kitchen, she found herself standing in the bathroom that connected to her bedroom. The bathtub was full to the brim, and waves of steam rose up from it. Hawke hadn't remembered filling a bath. She hadn't remembered thinking she deserved to be clean.

Her last full bath had been on the night of her rescue. Between then and now, she'd stolen quick moments to scrub herself down with a washcloth, always a few different parts each time and always done without undressing completely. She did regular enough mini-cleanups that she didn't give off a smell, but she could feel the sweat buildup on her body and the grease caked into the roots of her hair. Her skin always crawled with the sensations of whips and knives and ropes and roving Templar fingers, and she felt like a carcass with maggots on it. Being dirty worsened her hatred of being trapped inside herself, but bathing made her afraid. Bathing made her remember.

She still wore her house robe, and she tugged at its sash, not yet willing or ready to let it fall to the floor. How was she supposed to do this? Her heart pounded faster and she felt rooted into a frozen agony, like the way she had felt as a child when huge spiders appeared in the corner of her vision. She didn't want to see herself naked. She had too many whip lashes and flay wounds and bruises and places where she had bitten into her own flesh in order to distract from the excruciating pain. But the alternative was bathing in the dark, and the idea of darkness filled her with a heavy sense of malevolence as if a horde of demons had suddenly come for her.

She let her mind escape and avoided looking at her body as she yanked the robe to the floor and stepped into the painfully hot bath. She sank down to let its heat pierce her, as sharp as the knives that the Templars had wielded.

  
The heat hurt.  
The hurt took the other pain away.  
The hurt distracted her from hating herself.  
The hurt gave her a break from the whip that she lashed herself with inside her own mind.

  
_**Lashes like the whips they used when they dragged her from her cell and strapped her to the table so she couldn't move, tied down with tight wires that made her flesh swell and bleed, as they brought the whip down again and again and--** _

"Stopstopstopstopstop." Hawke sat up so hard that water sloshed over the edge of the tub. She grabbed her shampoo bottle, just so she would have something to hold, and rocked back and forth praying the memory would leave her mind.

_**\--again, and with each flow of new blood they made her read the Chant, they made her repent, they whipped new wounds on top of the old ones and then then, when she was finally too weak to cry, they untied her and dragged her to the floor and roughly spread her limbs apart and--** _

She squeezed the shampoo bottle and watched the smooth red liquid pool into her hand. Its scent, cinnamon, brought her back to the real world. She leaned forward and drank in its scent, blissfully grateful for a distraction, even if it was a tiny one. Glancing down caused her to see her ribs, which still poked slightly out despite her three weeks of being home. Eating enough food every day was harder than she'd thought it would be after a month of barely any.

_**Her first eight days in the Templars' cell, she'd been given no food. Finally, they'd relented, not wanting their plaything to die. They'd brought her rotten-smelling meat with maggots, but she ate it anyway, far beyond the point of caring. Only after she'd licked the last grease off her fingers had they told her that it had been part of an arm of a fellow prisoner who they'd killed, that they'd be killing her soon and when they did they'd feed her to the dogs and--** _

"No. Shut up. Maker damn it, shut the fuck up." Hawke brought her hands up to her wet hair and began to massage the shampoo into her roots. It felt good. Good enough to make her lip quiver and her eyes suddenly damp.

Savoring the feeling of cleanliness, Hawke slowly eased back until she was laying down in the tub again. Her sudsy hair was like a pillow, and she let her head rest against the tub's edge. The hot water surrounded her, like a warm blanket, like an embrace. When was the last time she had slept?

Not her momentary crashes on the floor or the nightmare-filled agony each night, but real sleep? The kind that felt good? This water was safe, like a cocoon, like a mother's womb.

She could shut her eyes, just for a little bit. She was safe here, she could be free from the nightmares.

She relaxed, and her head slipped below the water.

_**Darkness and freezing and trapped and dying. Can't move, can't breathe. Walls pressing, lungs collapsing and--** _

Hawke bolted upright in the tub so hard that waves sloshed over the edge and onto the floor, like a tsunami.

_**The Templars had drugged her and locked her in Solitary for a full week, alone with her mind and hellish hallucinations, and then they'd hauled her roughly by the roots of her hair into a new torture room. They'd told her they were on a ship, with a storm raging, about to suck them under the sea's inky waters as a curse because of her magic. In that moment, with no sleep and no food and no human contact, with the visions of demons entering her cell all those nights, she'd barely remembered what a ship even was, but she'd nodded with confusion. Then they'd brought out the crate and told her they were going to dump her overboard, stuffed in a wood box with holes at the top small enough to only let in a slow trickle of water, so she would feel the sensation of sinking down for miles before she ran out of air or was crushed by the pressure, whichever came first, with lots of time to think of dying alone while sinking into a bottomless sea and-** _

Hawke bit into her soap bar and screamed. She huddled into a ball, sobbing, begging her mind to stop this memory, even for just a few seconds, even for just this one moment, just like the way she'd begged when the Templars had the whip, just stop for this one fucking moment PLEASE--

_**Minutes must have passed in that dark cramped box, but it had felt like hours. It had felt like an eternity. When the box was so full of water she couldn't breathe anymore, they hauled the lid open and she saw that she was still there, still in the torture room, surrounded by the hoses of icewater they'd been using to torment her. She'd been so grateful for the sight of another human that she'd wrapped her arms around their legs, burying her face into their knees as they mocked her and spat at her face.** _

She gulped for air and forced herself to take a few deep breaths. The water was still scalding hot, but her skin was cold and littered with goosebumps.

She climbed out of the tub, still wet and covered with soap, and pulled on a new robe hastily without bothering to dry off. She caught a glimpse of her matted hair in the mirror and shook her head. This was why she hated to bathe.

Hawke walked into the hallway. The silent darkness of her house weighed on her like the world upon her shoulders. Except the house wasn't truly empty. Almost, but not quite.

Hawke passed her own bedroom and walked further, until she came to Orana's. The door was shut, but a faint glow of candle light shone from the crack under the door.

She took a deep breath and carefully knocked, trying to keep her voice soft. "Orana?"

The sound of quickly-shuffling papers came from behind the door. Hawke realized, too late, that she must have made the poor girl nervous. Hawke generally never bothered any of the servants in their bedrooms, out of a belief in respecting their privacy. Footsteps approached the door, and then it cracked open.

"Yes, Mistress Hawke?" Orana's eyes were wide with timid fear.

Hawke felt even worse. Her rampages must have been terrifying. She'd made her servants feel afraid of her, when they had done nothing but loyally stay by her side. She was an abuser, a traitor. The Templars should have killed her after all.

She realized she was crying, and brushed away her tears. "I've told you a million times, sweetheart, it's just Hawke. Please."

Orana swallowed. "Hawke. You're not well. What can I do to help you?"

Hawke walked into Orana's room, unable to stop the flow of tears now. She sat on the edge of the bed and hung her head. Orana wasted no time in walking to Hawke's side and pulling her into a hug. She stood there for moments like that, letting Hawke cry.

"I understand," Orana finally said, and Hawke knew that she did. Orana could relate, after seeing all her family and friends slaughtered for Hadriana's blood sacrifice, after nearly suffering that fate herself and believing she would die, after all those years of the degradation and abuse that Hadriana and Danarius had subjected her to.

Hawke hiccuped the aftermath of her sobs. Finally, that embarrassing outburst had ended. Why did she have to be such a pathetic lowlife? Why couldn't she control herself? Tears were a weakness, and the Templars had already taken her strength and dignity away. She would give anything to not have to feel this low again, but the abyss kept returning to pull her under, night after night and hour after hour. It never stopped.

"It's okay to let your people take care of you," said Orana gently. "My people saved me a thousand times."

"None of them want to," said Hawke flatly. "They never come around anymore. Merrill is so gloomy around me, Isabella always wants to leave, Anders looks at me like I'm a horrible monster."

Orana put a hand on Hawke's shoulder. "Oh, Maker. Is that what you think?"

Hawke looked up, waiting for an explanation. What other option could there be?

"Isabela wants to take your mind off it," Orana said. "That's why she just sticks to drinking, card games and telling her dirty stories. She wants to bring you out of the pain, she wants to make you laugh. Merrill is so not used to dealing with people that she doesn't know situations like this--she wants to help you, but she doesn't know how. And poor Anders is wracked with guilt. He'd turned you down before your attack just because he felt unworthy of you, and once he saw the trauma you went through, he hated himself for weeks at the idea that he had made you feel worse. He loves you, Hawke, he loves every fiber of your being, you can see it in the way he looks at you when your back is turned."

Hawke stared at the floor. So maybe her friends did want her. She could allow herself to hope that. More cold tears streaked down her face, and this time she didn't try to brush them away.

"I'll call them for you tomorrow, Hawke," said Orana. "All of them. Unless you object."

Hawke tried to keep her voice from breaking. "I don't object."

"Good." Orana gently squeezed her hand. "Then come on. Let's get your hair combed. Let's get something dry on you. Let's get a nice bright fireplace going and get you tucked into bed."

Hawke stood up and followed Orana to the door. For the first time ever, she felt safe in letting herself be led.


End file.
